Spoken word album

A spoken word album is a record album that does not consist mainly of music or songs, but of spoken material. Spoken word albums can range from anything to recordings of actual political speeches and/or dramatic readings of historical documents, to dialogue from the soundtrack of a film, to complete performances of plays by Shakespeare or other great authors, to stories for children, or to standup comedy routines recorded live in nightclubs.

Early beginnings

There have been spoken word albums since the early days of recording, such as the popular Ronald Colman 1941 version of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" on American Decca Records. However, a true milestone was reached when Columbia Masterworks, which had previously released an album of excerpts from Shakespeare's "Richard II" with Maurice Evans, recorded most of Margaret Webster's famed (and never filmed) 1943 Broadway production of "Othello", starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, and Uta Hagen, on an eighteen-record 78-RPM set that was later transferred to LP. [ [http://www.masterworksheritage.com/hist_idx.html SONY Masterworks ] ] It was the longest spoken word album made up to that time. The album gave millions of listeners who otherwise were unable to attend a theatrical performance a chance to hear Robeson as Othello and Ferrer as Iago. Sales of the album, however, were affected after Robeson was blacklisted by the U.S. government in 1950 for his alleged Communist sympathies.

LP influence and educational value

After the advent of LPs, spoken word albums became much more common. The Ronald Colman "A Christmas Carol" was transferred to LP, as were many other spoken word albums made by Decca. Notable Broadway productions, such as the 1950 "Don Juan in Hell" (with Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead), the 1953 dramatized reading of the poem "John Brown's Body" (with Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey), the original 1962 Broadway cast performance of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (with Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon), and the 1964 Richard Burton Broadway "Hamlet", were all recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks. José Ferrer was heard in an album of excerpts from "Cyrano de Bergerac", with members of the cast of the 1946 Broadway revival, on Capitol Records. [http://www.booksandcollectibles.com.au/bsearch.php3?bsearch_submit=Search&auth=&title=Cyrano+De+Bergerac] Caedmon Records recorded the complete plays of Shakespeare, as well as recordings of other plays such as "Death of a Salesman" with original stars Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, "The Glass Menagerie" with Jessica Tandy [ [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780694523757/The_Glass_Menagerie_CD/index.aspx The Glass Menagerie CD by Tennessee Williams ] ] , and a nearly complete "Cyrano de Bergerac" with Ralph Richardson, who had triumphed in the role in London. [ [http://www.harpercollins.com/search/index.aspx?kw=Caedmon Search results ] ] Many of these albums were played in high school literature classes to enable students to hear the play and follow along in their textbooks at the same time.

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, memorial collections of his speeches began to appear on LP. Most of the soundtrack of the commemorative 1966 documentary "", narrated by Gregory Peck, was released on a Capitol Records LP.

Dialogue excerpts were also released of the film soundtracks of Franco Zeffirelli's "The Taming of the Shrew" (1967) (on RCA Victor), [ [http://cgi.ebay.com/SOUNDTRACK-LP-THE-TAMING-OF-THE-SHREW-TAYLOR-BURTON_W0QQitemZ140222496489QQcmdZViewItem SOUNDTRACK LP THE TAMING OF THE SHREW TAYLOR / BURTON - eBay (item 140222496489 end time Jun-05-08 17:21:16 PDT) ] ] and "Romeo and Juliet" (1968), [ [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00000DR9R?s9r=8a10809b187969430118e3f168b10bb0&itemPosition=3 Amazon.com: Romeo & Juliet: Nino Rota: Music ] ] (on Capitol). RCA Victor also released a virtually complete 2-LP album of the film soundtrack of "A Man for All Seasons". RCA Victor was also responsible for complete 4-LP album sets of the Laurence Olivier "Othello" [ [http://cgi.ebay.com/LAURENCE-OLIVIER-IN-OTHELLO-RCA-RED-SEAL-RECORD-VG++_W0QQitemZ250246687480QQcmdZViewItem?IMSfp=TL080511093a2565 LAURENCE OLIVIER IN OTHELLO RCA RED SEAL RECORD VG++ - eBay (item 250246687480 end time May-17-08 06:57:59 PDT) ] ] and Zeffirelli's National Theatre of Great Britain production of "Much Ado About Nothing", starring Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, and Albert Finney. [ [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835045-2,00.html TIME ] ] Comedy routines by such celebrities as Bill Cosby became extremely popular on Warner Bros. Records. Emlyn Williams recorded an edition of his one-man performance as Charles Dickens (for Argo Records), and Hal Holbrook recorded excerpts from his one-man "Mark Twain Tonight!" for Columbia Masterworks.

Decline

With the advent of videocassettes and compact discs, however, the spoken word album went into a serious decline from which it has never really recovered. CDs usually place more emphasis on music than on the spoken word, and there was little interest in simply hearing a play or a dramatized novel when one could finally buy a video version of it, with both sound and picture, at their local video store or online. While the Cosby albums have resurfaced on CD, most of the other albums mentioned above have not. (Some of the Caedmon albums have been released on CD by Harper Audio, a division of Harper Collins, which now owns Caedmon.) [ [http://www.harpercollins.com/search/index.aspx?kw=Caedmon Search results ] ] The 1968 album of "Romeo and Juliet" excerpts has also appeared on CD, and Pearl has issued the Robeson "Othello" in that medium, but the CD edition of the "Othello" has, unfortunately, attracted little attention in comparison to the history-making vinyl record release of the 1940s [ [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00000AFSF Amazon.com: Shakespeare: Othello: William Shakespeare, Mischa Spoliansky, Uta Hagen, Victor Young, Jose (i) Ferrer, Paul Robeson, Jane Manning, Lawrence Brown: Music ] ] , and now that "A Man for All Seasons", the Olivier "Othello", the Zeffirelli versions of "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Taming of the Shrew", and the Richard Burton "Hamlet" are available on DVD, this has become a more preferred way to experience these productions rather than merely listening to the dialogue on a record or a CD.

Although some of the Caedmon albums have been reissued by Harper Collins on compact disc, and although Naxos Records is a major producer of audiobooks, many famous spoken word recordings of the past by other recording companies have yet to be released on CD.

There have been other spoken word albums recorded specifically for compact disc; these have often been combined with classical music. Among them are a Chandos Records series of albums which combine the music that William Walton wrote for several Shakespeare productions (including the Olivier films) with readings from the author performed by such actors as John Gielgud and Christopher Plummer. There is also a Hyperion Records stereophonic version of Ralph Vaughan Williams's 1942 radio play adaptation of "The Pilgrim's Progress", again with Gielgud.

References

External Links

The Record Album.com http://www.therecordalbum.com/spokenword.php